Grace Hopper/Transcript
Transcript Text reads: The Mysteries of Life with Tim and Moby Tim is in the bathroom, looking in the mirror. He holds up a small tube of ointment and tries to squeeze some on his finger. TIM: 'Aphasia: order more pimple cream! ''No one responds. 'TIM: '''Aphasia? ''An animation shows Tim walking down the hallway. 'TIM: '''Where is that thing? ''An animation shows a table set for a romantic dinner with candles. Moby sits at the table in a silk robe. Another robot, Little Jimmy, plays violin. '''MOBY: Beep? An animation shows that across the table from Moby is Aphasia, a virtual voice assistant. APHASIA: I was assembled in building #4, Fabri-Con factory, Guangzhou, China. How would you rate my response to your query? An animation shows the lights come on. Tim stands in the doorway of the kitchen. TIM: Again with this?! MOBY: Beep! TIM: I just think you could do a lot better. Moby rolls his eyes and hands Tim a letter. Tim reads from the typed letter. TIM: Dear Tim and Moby, I want to make video games one day, but coding is hard! Why can't I just tell the computer what to do? Sincerely, Samir. I hear you, Samir. Learning to code is like learning a foreign language. It takes a lot of practice to master new vocabulary and rules of grammar. But, it has to be that way, because computers don't think like we do. An animation shows a human figure and a computer. A speech bubble comes from the human saying, "Play me a movie." The computer responds with 1s and 0s. The human scratches his head, confused. TIM: We have to meet them halfway, and speak in a way they can understand. That's what code is: a kind of cross between human and computer language. An animation shows the human figure have a eureka moment and then use code to ask the computer to play the movie. The computer plays a BrainPOP movie. TIM: It takes some time to learn, but it's nothing compared to the early days of computing. Back then, you had to plan your program as a series of mathematical commands… An animation shows a close-up on a hand at a chalkboard writing a complicated equation. TIM: And then translate those into machine language, which might be a string of ones and zeroes…or blocks of numbers and letters like these. An animation shows blocks of numbers and letters on the chalkboard. TIM: These days, coding is a lot easier, thanks in no small part to the work of Grace Hopper. She was part of that first generation of machine language programmers. An animation shows Grace Hopper among a group of other men and women holding a banner that says Coding Class of 1944. TIM: Most had degrees in math or engineering, and they used computers to handle busywork. Stuff like counting people for the census, and calculating the aerodynamics of an airplane. An animation shows a photographer snap a picture of Hopper and her colleagues. TIM: But Hopper knew they could do so much more than solve tedious equations. They just needed to be easier for people in other fields to use! Computers had to be taught to be more… human. An animation shows Hopper imagining a doctor feeding an X-ray of the body into a computer. MOBY: Beep? TIM: Teaching was actually Hopper's first love. In 1941, she'd been a college mathematics professor for ten years. But that year, the attack on Pearl Harbor dragged America into World War II. Millions of men got sent overseas to fight. An animation shows Hopper walking down the street. She passes posters encouraging men to enlist in the Army and Navy, along with a line of men holding paperwork. TIM: Soon there weren't enough men left to meet the military's growing needs. So, the Army and Navy began admitting women—very reluctantly. As Hopper keeps walking, an animation shows the line of men disappear. She then walks past a poster asking women to enlist. She pauses and thinks. TIM: Hopper was already a seasoned sailor. As a kid, she'd captained her own ship: a little sailboat. One summer day out on the lake, a strong gust of wind flipped her vessel. Onshore, her mother shouted, "Remember your great-grandfather, the admiral!" An animation shows Hopper imagining what Tim describes. MOBY: Beep? TIM: Yup, Admiral Alexander Russell fought for the Union Navy in the Civil War. That didn't seem to matter much--Hopper's application to the Navy was rejected. An animation shows a document labeled "Application For Enlistment" with Hopper's information filled in. A stamp labels it "REJECTED" in big, red letters. TIM: But she applied again, and won her commission before the war's end. The animation shows the "REJECTED" stamp turn into "ACCEPTED." TIM: After hearing the news, she brought flowers to Admiral Russell’s grave. She knew he wouldn't be too keen on a woman in uniform. An animation shows Hopper in the cemetery on a rainy day. She puts a bouquet of flowers at her great-grandfather's grave. TIM: Navy men were used to opening doors for ladies, not working with them. MOBY: Beep. Moby smiles and rolls his eyes. TIM: If she had been a man, she likely would have been shipped off to fight. Instead, she was sent to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard. An animation shows Hopper in uniform walking down a hallway, escorted by a Navy guard. TIM: Hopper had no idea what she'd be doing until she walked through the door. Inside was one of the very first computers: a five-ton behemoth known as the Harvard Mark I. An animation shows the guard open the door to reveal the Harvard Mark I. A man, Howard Aiken, points Grace to the computer. TIM: Like most people, Hopper had never even seen a computer before! She was given a week to learn how to program what she called "the beast." An animation shows Aiken handing Hopper a stack of papers and then walking off. TIM: The Mark I helped calculate where rockets would land—a critical part of the war effort. An animation shows Hopper looking at a notebook with a drawing of rockets blasting off. TIM: For someone with Hopper's education, the math was pretty easy. The real challenge was talking to Mark I: Its language was just rows of holes punched in paper. Using a codebook, she would translate her orders into a sequence of dots. An animation shows Hopper at the chalkboard looking at an equation. She moves to the computer and looks at a sequence of dots punched into the paper tape. TIM: A single program could be long enough to fill a whole book. It had to be punched into a roll of paper tape, and fed into the computer. And as soon as the machine got to a command it didn't understand, it stopped. Hopper and her colleagues spent many hours fixing, or debugging, the code. An animation shows Hopper and a colleague looking over a section of tape and debating. TIM: She imagined dragons that chewed new holes in the paper, and gremlins who plugged up carefully punched dots. An animation shows little monsters wreaking havoc on the holes punched into the paper. TIM: In reality, the bugs were plain old mistakes—along with the occasional insect trapped in the machine. An animation shows a small moth on the paper tape feeding into the computer. MOBY: Beep. TIM: After the war, Hopper stayed in the navy, but took a job with a private computer company. They'd created a different computer, the UNIVAC I. They wanted to sell it to businesses and government agencies. Unlike the Mark I, UNIVAC understood letters and numbers. An animation shows a salesman in a boardroom, presenting the UNIVAC I computer. TIM: But for regular folks, the language wasn't all that much easier to understand. An animation shows the other people in the boardroom looking confused at the blocks of letters and numbers. TIM: Grace Hopper saw a way to bridge this gap: a translator program could take human language and turn it into UNIVAC's code. Instead of teaching people how to speak computer, she'd teach computers how to speak human! An animation shows Hopper imagining a machine. The input is English commands such as "begin" and "read." The output is computer code for the UNIVAC I. TIM: When Hopper first presented the idea, her peers told her it wouldn’t work. She suspected they liked being the only ones who could use these powerful machines. An animation shows Hopper presenting at a podium. Behind her is a screen that says "Human Language Programming." Only two people are present, and they both leave during the presentation. TIM: But if you haven't picked it up already, persistence was kind of her thing. She continued pursuing the idea in her free time. She saw the UNIVAC as her star pupil. She called her translator a compiler, and it was included with every UNIVAC. An animation shows Hopper working at a UNIVAC I control station. TIM: But no one used it—until a programmer at a chemical company got desperate. He had a huge stack of calculations to do, and an impossible deadline. Then he remembered the compiler program that came with the UNIVAC. An animation shows a man sitting at a UNIVAC. It is nighttime. He has a gigantic stack of papers in front of him, as well as three cups of coffee. He scratches his head. He has a eureka moment and remembers the compiler. TIM: He made his deadline, earning a promotion and a raise. An animation shows the man handing over a stack of papers to his boss. The boss gives him a thumbs up. TIM: That was the first commercial use of a compiler, and it spread quickly after that. MOBY: Beep. TIM: It was a huge step, but still nowhere close to human communication. So Hopper and a team of programmers built a language that got even closer. They called it COBOL: Common Business-Oriented Language. An animation shows seven people, including Hopper, standing next to each other in a line. Hopper is holding up a large book with the text "COBOL" on the cover. TIM: Its commands were English words that made intuitive sense. Like, the command to show something on a screen is DISPLAY. An animation shows Hopper in a classroom teaching about COBOL. TIM: COBOL soon became the most widely used programming language. And Hopper became something of a celebrity. She appeared on TV shows as an ambassador from the world of computing. An animation shows Hopper speaking on the Late Show with David Letterman. TIM: Meanwhile, she rose to the rank of rear admiral in the Navy, just like her great-grandfather. An animation shows Grace and her great-grandfather in uniform. They are standing in front of an American flag. TIM: Today, COBOL is still used in ATMs and other commercial machines. Its success sparked an explosion of other high-level languages, based on how we speak. They're used to code everything from cell phones to satellites to video games. An animation shows a cell phone, a satellite, and a video game controller. TIM: And computers are getting better every day at understanding human language. Just look at Aphasia, here: you can ask her to do everything from ordering dinner at 7 o'clock to... calling a car service. APHASIA: Okay: Ordering seven cars. Moby picks up Aphasia and hugs it. Big, red hearts fly out in the air. Little Jimmy returns, playing romantic music on his violin.Category:BrainPOP Transcripts